After Amazon paid nearly $1 billion to acquire the streaming video service Twitch more than five years ago, it looked like the company had a shot at turning it into the next YouTube. That view got a boost when Twitch began pushing beyond its main audience of gamers into cooking and craft videos.  

So far, though, Twitch is falling short in a number of ways. It hasn’t yet become the advertising powerhouse that Amazon envisions it as. It brought in about $230 million in ad revenue in 2018, according to two people familiar with the matter, and as of the middle of last year, Twitch was on track to deliver about $300 million in ad revenue for the full year, according to another person.

That was short of an internal goal for the year of between $500 million and $600 million, that person and another familiar with the matter said. YouTube, in contrast, is believed to rake in billions of ad dollars annually.